New York City
New York City is an island (and some surrounding environs) on the eastern coast of North America, located in and near Hudson Bay, and currently serves as the cultural center of the Universe, a role the city has fulfilled begrudgingly since 1849, despite efforts to turn it into a Suburbanite theme park by the likes of 1990's Mayor Rudy 'Gigolo' Giuliani and into a corrupt cesspool of despair by 1860s Mayor Boss Tweed. It is home to eight million people and has a total of 24 spoken languages present among its inhabitants, though the official language of the city is New Yohka (sometimes spelled Newyohrkah) which is Standard Atlantic American English tainted by Italian speech rhythms and Yiddish phrases and tonalities, resulting in a surprisingly brusque and blue-collar sounding dialect. It must be mentioned that New Yohka is only spoken by middle- and lower-class white populations of Native New Yorkers whose parent's grandparents were immigrants to the city, at most recent. Despite New York being one of the world capitals for fashion, modeling, and physical culture of all kinds, New Yorkers on average tend to be as overweight as Chicagoans and as fashionable as Clevelanders. Despite setting cultural standards for the rest of the nation New Yorkers tend to be as annoying as Bostonians, as pretentious as San Franciscans, and as “authentic” as New Jerseyites; they tend also to be as worshipful of wealth and materialism as Los Angelians, despite the average household income being lower than the national average, the cost of living, especially among rent and property ownership costs, being so high as to be nearly surreal, and the population density and average apartment size being what sociologists describe as “bananas.” Popularly rumored to have been purchased in 1609 by the Dutchman Peter Minuit from native Lenape tribesmen for twenty dollars, any idiot could think for even a moment and realize that Native Americans that lived in the wilderness and hadn't ever seen glass or steel before would have no use whatsoever for a fucking 20 dollar bill, except, perhaps, for use as kindling for a fire so small a piss stream could put it out. In reality, the island of Manhattan was traded for around 42 dollars worth of random stuff, not currency, and the deal was sealed with an enormous amount of drinking together, with Manhattan, the eventual name of the island purchased, being a drunk Dutchman's approximation the Lenape word for “Place we Got Drunk That One Time.” The natives were new to booze, and it was a reasonably big deal to try it for the first time. New York is also home to the most highly respected news source in the world, widely regarded as the newspaper of record, The New York Times, which despite humanist and liberal ideals in the 21st Century, did recommend to authorities in pieces covering the 1863 Draft Riots that the only solution for quelling the mongrel Irish hoards in the streets (rioting against extremely rich-favoring laws regarding draft exemption, mind you) is grapeshot cannon fire. New York City steadily grew during the 19th Century, eventually annexing surrounding cities into its official boundaries, such as Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, etc, but in quintessential New York fashion stopped before including places that it determined itself far too much better than, such as Newark, NY or Hoboken, NJ. Unfortunately Los Angeles never showed such dignified restraint in its exapnsions into neighboring territories (Los Angeles is larger than many New England states, and not a few European nations, and all the shittier for it). Most notably, New York City was the setting and filming location for Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis' two-part masterpiece, Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters 2, in the second of which the principal characters slather the interior of the Statue of Liberty with protoplasm, thus turning it into a semi-sentient Golem with which they successfully flatten cop cars and do battle with a 50 story high sentient Stay Puff'd Marshmellow Man and are able to conquer the otherwise totally impenetrable New York City traffic (which, funny enough, is caused by New Jersey residents who stupidly drive to work, known by New Yorkers as "the Bridge and Tunnel Crowd," and not by Manhattan residents themselves). Why the Ghostbusters did not just take the subway is anyone's guess. Nevertheless, New York City has never fully recovered from how awesome this was.